Conflicts between Galileo and the Church

Galileo took one of the first steps leading toward the death of biblical belief of the universe by mounting a systematic challenge to the biblical notion that the earth was the center of the universe. The centrality of Earth had long been associated with the beliefs of Aristotle and Ptolemy that had been adopted as the official teaching of the church. Aristotle and Ptolemy believed that the Earth was immovable and was orbited by concentric spheres in which the various planets and stars were rooted. Galileo sought to confirm the theory, presented in the sixteenth century by Copernicus, that the sun was the center of the universe. Galileo believed that mathematics is a guide to truth. He used mathematics to account for the heavenly motions.
When Galileo proved that the sun is the center of the universe and that the earth revolves around the sun, the church reacted against such challenges regarding them as contrary to the bible and heretical. His first argument is that when ...